Arthur Symons

Arthur Symons, tempera painting by R.H. Sauter, 1935; in the National Portrait Gallery, LondonCourtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

Arthur Symons, in full Arthur William Symons
(born Feb. 28, 1865, Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Eng.—died Jan. 22, 1945, Wittersham, Kent), poet and critic, the first English champion of the French Symbolist poets.

Symons’s schooling was irregular, but, determined to be a writer, he soon found a place in the London literary journalism of the 1890s. He joined the Rhymers’ Club (a group of poets including William Butler Yeats and Ernest Dowson), contributed to The Yellow Book, and became editor of a new magazine, The Savoy (1896), with Aubrey Beardsley as art editor. Symons was well versed in European literature and knew the French writers Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. He expanded his pioneering essay “The Decadent Movement in Literature” (Harper’s, November 1893) into a book, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), which influenced both Yeats and T.S. Eliot; in it he characterized Symbolist literature as suggesting or evoking the “unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness.” Symons’s criticism constitutes an ambitious development of Walter Pater’s model of the “aesthetic critic.”

Symons’s best poetry is strongly fin de siècle in feeling. Days and Nights (1889), Silhouettes (1892), and London Nights (1895) contain admirable impressionist lyrics, sensitive to the complex moods of urban life. “Episode of a Night of May” is an exquisitely ironic fixing of the detail of modern social experience; “Maquillage” is one of the best statements of the Aesthetic cult of artifice; Yeats described “La Mélinite: Moulin Rouge” as “one of the most perfect lyrics of our time.” Symons suffered a serious attack of mental illness in 1908–10. He recovered to produce, over the next 20 years, a stream of travel writing, criticism, and translation, though he never quite regained the intense originality of his early period.